Google Calendar?
Dave Jung thinks Google has a special crawler reading calendar data, based on the fact that his ical-based website calendar is getting huge hits from a Googlebot.
I’ve seen serious traffic on my church’s website this month from Googlebots. Last year I added a Calendar to the site using the ical standard, and now the Googlebots are pinging the heck out of the php pages rendering the calendar. We’re talking 90% of the site’s accesses have been from Google this month.
Its an interesting idea. Google does want to organize the world’s information, and calendar information is a unique type of information. Presumably, Google Calendar would be like Google News, crawling calendars in real-time and displaying as updated information as possible, and letting you search it to find things to do in your area at particular times.
I’d love to see lots of little Googles, searching all sorts of data. You’ve got miniature Googles displaying flight info and package tracking data, and the more the merrier. Google’s got many years ahead of them to create all of these mini repositories of data, and I think if they really make good on the “organizing all the world’s information”, its going to be very hard for any other engine to catch up.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)
Lots of little googlebots means webmasters better start upgrading their hosting accounts to the higher bandwidth levels. Bots already overpower many sites bandwidth, and it is looking like it is only going to get worse. Don’t get me wrong…I like bots , but the bandwidth issues can get out of hand if Google decides to start sending more and more bots to a site.
Comment by Dazzlindonna | February 23, 2005
GCalendar would also make a good companion to Gmail.
Comment by Eric | February 23, 2005
More bots equals more visitors. As any person with a site on Google News can attest (I just check my newspaper’s site logs), placement on a major service means lots of new readers, every day. That bot will hurt your server a little, but the increase in visitors should translate nicely into increased ad revenue. Of course, if you don’t have a business model that can handle your site getting more popular, you’re in trouble.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | February 23, 2005
If you can tell from your server log that a visitor was a bot, you can tell that a user is a bot at the time of the visit, and serve the bot a low-bandwidth version of the page.
Comment by Unbathed | March 3, 2005
The Google Calendar will be a great idea. Does anyone know when it might come out?
Comment by Alex S. | September 15, 2005
[…] Interessante quanto riportato da InsideGoogle: sembrerebbe che Googlebot stia viaggiando per la rete alla ricerca di calendari pubblicati con lo standard iCalendar. […]
Pingback by Luca Zappa Web Corner » Blog Archive » calendar.google.com | September 30, 2005
This happened to me too; however my conclusion is simply that the calendar software I use (PHP iCalendar) creates so many links between pages (back, next, previous month, next month, etc.) that Googlebot tries to follow them all. Now, this is really an infinite universe of pages if you followed them all, at least until we run out of calendar dates, so I’m not surprised at the number of hits you received.
I got around the problem by simply adding a rule to my robots.txt.
BTW, if Google wanted to trawl all calendar information in the world, they would only look at .ics (iCalendar) files, right, why would they fetch the HTML-ized versions of your calendar?
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